Abstract
Y-chromosomes from 76 Chinese men covering 33 ethnical minorities throughout China as well as the Han majority were collected as genetic material for the study of Chinese nonrecombinant Y-chromosome (NRY) phylogeny. Of the accepted worldwide NRY haplogroups, three (haplogroups D, C, O) were significant in this sample, extending previous assessments of Chinese genetic diversity. Based on geographic, linguistic, and ethnohistorical information, the 33 Chinese ethnical minorities in our survey were divided into the following four subgroups: North, Tibet, West, and South. Inferred from the distribution of the newfound immediate ancestor lineage haplogroup O*, which has M214 but not M175, we argue that the southern origin scenario of this most common Chinese Y haplogroup is not very likely. We tentatively propose a West/North-origin hypothesis, suggesting that haplogroup O originated in West/North China and mainly evolved in China and thence spread further throughout eastern Eurasia. The nested cladistic analysis revealed in detail a multilayered, multidirectional, and continuous history of ethnic admixture that has shaped the contemporary Chinese population. Our results give some new clues to the evolution and migration of the Chinese population and its subsequence moving about in this land, which are in accordance with the historical records.
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Acknowledgements
We are grateful to the DNA donors and the investigators who helped in collecting the samples. We thank Miss Liang Li (undergraduate student, Beijing University, Beijing) for experiment assistant, and Dr Geir Skogerbo (Visiting Scientist, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing) for providing helpful discussion and critical review of our manuscript. This work was supported by Chinese Academy of Sciences Grant KSCX2-2-07, the National High Technology Development Program (973) of China under Grant No. 2002CB713805, and Beijing Science and Technology Commission Grant H010210010113.
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Deng, W., Shi, B., He, X. et al. Evolution and migration history of the Chinese population inferred from Chinese Y-chromosome evidence. J Hum Genet 49, 339–348 (2004). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10038-004-0154-3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10038-004-0154-3
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